Pennsylvania State Police Win Inaugural STARS Innovation Award!

The Pennsylvania State Police Department won the Inaugural STARS Innovation award at the 2017 Nlets STARS Workshop last week in San Antonio, Texas. The award recognizes excellence in criminal justice training and auditing, which is the focus of the STARS Workshop.

Pennsylvania State Police won the award for a project that identified and addressed a deficiency in their state's warrant entry process. Pennsylvania found that there were a higher number of warrants issued by the courts that were not entered into their state system. The project was aimed at creating a process that would ensure that all warrants issued by the courts, that met the criteria for entry, were electronically entered into their state system.

The project started in 2009, and by 2011 the initial phase was implemented. In 2013, they added the warrant correction application and in 2015 they updated messages and commands to manually correct errors. By 2016, they had updated the messages that were being delivered to the agencies and the application tables were being updated, as needed, to coincide with the current changes to misdemeanor and felony charges.

Jason Winkowski accepted the award on behalf of the Pennsylvania State Police. Congratulations to all involved!